She built a holy house in L.A., then told police a holey story

Aimee Semple McPherson was equal parts prophet and performer, a charismatic Canadian farm girl who stormed into boom-town Los Angeles with "ten dollars and a tambourine."

- BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD

Apic/Bridgeman AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON, the founder of Foursquare Church, disappeared from Venice Beach in 1926 and later told police she had been kidnapped.

The church she built, the lavishly domed and pillared Angelus Temple in Echo Park, resembled both a movie palace and the Colosseum.

She wrapped old-time religion in Hollywood razzmatazz. She made Pentecostalism mainstream and the Bible a vaudeville show. She was the biggest spectacle in a town rapidly building its identity on it.

Draped in dazzling robes and capes, she eschewed fire-and-brimstone rhetoric in favor of a sunnier, more optimistic message. She preached to 7,000 people a day with a brass band and an orchestra. She reenacted the Scriptures with live camels, lions and lambs. She topped her church with radio towers to reach the sinning masses. At her touch, it was said, broken limbs were mended and the blind gained sight. During the Great Depression, she fed thousands.

She was one of the most famous women in America, but tantalizingly sphinx-like, then and now. The enduring mystery of her life remains what motivated her vanishing act during a five-week period from May to June 1926.

McPherson, 35, had been sitting under an umbrella on Venice Beach, working on a sermon called “Light & Darkness.” As farasherpan-icked secretary could tell, she then walked into the water and never came out.

A May 19, 1926 edition of the Los Angeles Record featured five front-page stories about the disappearance and presumed death of “the world’s greatest woman evangelist.” One story reported that “the ocean opened its arms and embraced in death the pastor.”

Thousands crowded the beach as divers searched for her. According to journalist Claire Hoffman's new biography, “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,” one diver died of hypothermia and a despairing disciple drowned herself.